It’s common knowledge, though not commonly admitted, that biographers tend to identify with their subjects. Local author Andrea Friederici Ross, who’s written a deeply researched, briskly readable account of the life of Chicago grande dame Edith Rockefeller McCormick, admits this to her readers right up front. During the decade of research and writing that went into Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McCormick (Southern Illinois University Press), Ross says in her preface, Edith became an obsession, in part because her story “mirrored my own (minus the jewels, the collections, the millions).”
Edith was John D. Rockefeller’s fourth daughter. (The son he was hoping for arrived two years later.) In spite of her father’s enormous wealth, the children were raised—first in Cleveland, later in New York—in a strict, sober, and frugal Baptist environment. Edith, the smartest and most studious of her siblings, rejected both the religion as practiced and the frugality.
When she returned to Chicago in 1921, she was in the midst of a divorce that turned out to be very expensive for her, in spite of the fact that it was her husband who wanted it, having abandoned her for an aspiring opera singer. (Did I mention that, in happier days, they’d given Chicago its first opera company?) His legal team included Clarence Darrow. She was accompanied on this return trip by a young male friend whom she would soon bankroll in a real estate development company that boomed and then went bust in the Great Depression, taking thousands of small investors down with it.
